Review: Namaste London

A story about the greatness of Indian culture makes you long for the glory days of Manoj Kumar. Surely that can’t be good!

MAR 25, 2007 – I WALKED OUT OF Vipul Shah’s Namastey London in a daze, finally knowing what it must feel like to be the solitary Martian in a roomful of earthlings. I sat there utterly unmoved as the people around me weren’t merely laughing… they were bellowing. It got to a point where Akshay Kumar had to merely show up, and the guy in the next seat would begin to crack up – and I wondered if the problem was with them or with me. Okay, okay, don’t bother to answer that – but before I’m accused of class or snootiness, let me present in my defense that my all-time Top Ten comedy moments include the glorious farting-around-the-campfire sequence in Blazing Saddles, as well as the sight of a grown-up Kishore Kumar in half-pants, lollipop in hand, pretending to be a child in Half Ticket. There’s only one gag here that made clutch my sides, one that owes its existence to Ekta Kapoor’s saas–bahu serials. This bit is truly a gem. As for the other jokes, the highlight may well be the plot itself, which asks us to invest in the outcome of a stale love triangle: Will Jasmeet (an awful Katrina Kaif; she usually gets away with her terrific looks, but here she’s made up and shot so unflatteringly, she appears at times like the world’s loveliest drag queen) opt for Punjabi lad Arjun (Akshay Kumar) or an Englishman called, uh, Charlie Brown? Phrased differently, who would a girl of today like her prospective husband to be named after: the great archer-hero of the Mahabharata, or the bald kid from Peanuts?

The problem with Namastey London is that it just can’t pick a mood and stick with it. An early scene revolves around a church wedding, but the music in the background isn’t Wagner’s bridal chorus. It’s one of those ear-shattering female solos with gooey lyrics – Did you ever think of me as your best friend – that Celine Dion would have typically sung during the closing credits, and your mind screams chick-flick. But before you can settle down with that categorisation, the flag waving begins. Indians good, non-Indians bad, we’re told, as we suffer through neo-Manoj Kumar-isms like Rishi Kapoor’s (infusing charm and humour in a film that otherwise has neither) cell phone going off to the ring tone of Saare jahaan se achchha, and Akshay Kumar’s enumeration of India’s achievements down the ages (to a bunch of mocking Brits) – a bit of screenwriting that, in terms of misguided patriotism, ranks up there with the K3G moment where Kajol’s kid breaks into our national anthem at his lily-white school. (If they’re really worried about India’s image in the eyes of the world, not making these movies would be a good start.) Then there’s the comedy. Something like Purab Aur Paschim was at least all-out drama – well, except for the unintended laughs from Rajendra Nath as a swingin’ hippie – and therefore easier to take, but what to make of the bizarre, meant-as-funny episode here when an Englishwoman is introduced as Pauline, and someone exclaims about the former’s nude pictures (on the beach) that got printed in the papers? Is this a nod to Eric Rohmer of all people, to his Pauline at the Beach?

Namastey London offers intriguing insights into the hypocrisy of NRIs, who raise their children as products of their new environment – so that this younger generation can escape the awkwardness of adapting to new clothes and newer accents – and yet insist on “Hindustani‿ spouses when it’s time for marriage. And it’s a nice touch that the film treats India and Pakistan as being part of the same subcontinental mass. But these digressions don’t amount to much, because the characters driving home these points are gigantic clichés. The Brits are offensive twits. The Indian-born kids are debauched smokers and drinkers and disco-goers just waiting to be enlightened about the glories of our 5000-year-old civilisation. And our hero is a reincarnation of Mr. Bharat himself, a milk-white martyr who sees the heroine in a towel in her bedroom, and preserves her modesty by pulling the door shut. And did I mention he oozes empathy from every pore? If you thought the metrosexual male was all about Shah Rukh sobbing in Chalte Chalte or Saif in a pink tee in Salaam Namaste, you haven’t seen Akshay here. He waits and he waits for his girl to stop partying and come home to him, and he comes off like Shabana Azmi’s doormat-wife in Swarg Narak, who waited and waited for her husband to stop partying and come home to her. All this saintly sensitivity almost makes you wish for the old days, when all it took for the man to bring the woman to her senses was one tight slap.

s: Aw c’mon. Cut brangan some slack. Why take the last line out of context (as in advocacy of domestic violence or some kind of misogynistic fetish willed to fruition or a rib against feminist head-rearing…you know, any one of the gazillion possiblities that those who’re intent upon finding flaws in one whose intent is in fact flawless can so casually dream up)? Why not see it for what it is: a contrast of the reel (not real) life treatment of the whole husband-wife dynamic today as established by Akshaye’s door-mat-like character in NL vs. perhaps (in an “ah how refreshing old can sometimes be” sorta way) the “Uyarndha Manidhan” Nadigar Thilakam’s strong character who successfully reins in an oh-so-annoying domineering wife that was Sowcar Janaki, by (eventually) giving her one tight slap that in fact ends up imbuing her life with such happiness that she celebrates it with this love song: “Aththaanin muththangal aththanayum muththukkal, azhagaana kannaththil adayala chinnangal”). And God knows how many of us, growing up, simply loved watching these slapathons-turned-love-athons (pun intended! “Aththaan,” get it?) for their unadulterated drama. Then why the double standard when it comes to acknowledging a benign oh-so-honest expression of (movie) nostalgia?

Baradwaj Rangan makes us wonder and laugh and fall in love with language and the movies all at once with his shoot-from-the-hip-aim-for-the-heart writing that makes it clear that no censoring whatsoever occurs between his thinking something and his saying the same thing–which is why he’s so entertaining. Now why on earth would we shoot ourselves in the foot by colluding to turn our most beloved movie critic into a politically correct bore? Let’s not!

On a lighter note, speaking of high-profile “slappings” winding up in life-altering love affairs, did you know that K.Balachander had slapped Kamal Haasan on the sets of “Antuleeni Katha,” the 1976 remake of Sujatha’s (the actress, not the now-no-more writer) awe-inspiring “Aval Oru ThodarKadhai”? It was Jayapradha’s debut movie (she played Sujatha’s role at an oh-so-innocent 14) and she apparently jumped out of her skin and went running to her dad, crying (yeah, right, like she was the one who got slapped…At 14, I lost count of the number of times I’d gotten solid slaps from my dad — all for good reasons, I know) and I guess her dad ultimately talked her into (as only dads can) a career-defining performance. By the way, Rajini was in the movie too (playing the Jai Ganesh role) and Kamal’s was a cameo (as Jayapradha’s obnoxious boss). Imagine for a moment if Kamal (given his now-life-size ego) had gotten all bent out of shape and walked out on KB, then and there…Well, in that case I guess he wouldn’t get to look back today, nostalgically rub his cheek and go “Ninaiththaale Inikkum,” would he? 🙂

I have read most of your movie reviews Mr. Rangan and I have no doubt in saying that this is your best review ever. Absolutely classic.

The reason I rate this your best is ’cause I just loved the way you dismissed the movie. I didn’t like the movie myself but I couldn’t figure out why. IMO, its easy to write a review of a good movie ’cause there will be lots of things to say. But with pathetic movies like these, it gets really tough to write a review that fully concentrates on the things that made the movie bad (the other reviews I have read so far of this movie just dismissed the movie saying the story was poor or the screenplay was bad without even elaborating a tad bit as to why they were so). Your review does exactly that.

Did revisit the movie recently. Perfectly put. I remember much of my friends going gaga over this flick that can best be described as a misplaced idea of patriotism that is so often reflected in the India, in particular the social media enthusiasts, of today. The film wants you to take sides with the father who wants his daughter to fill his hypocritical ambitions, much to her discomfort, reinforcing the male chauvinist idea that a woman is meant to be shown “her place”. Even when viewed as a simple tale of fiction, the film relied on gags in the first half (some pulled off successfully by Rishi Kapoor) while the second half turned into a sappy, unrealistic drama. This is certainly not Akshay’s good films.